世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjuction with goo Research, carried out an online poll amongst the goo Research Monitors to find out what they thought about Wikipedia. They surveyed 1,060 people, 55.6% female, over a few days at the start of April. The age demographics were 24.6% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 23.7% in their forties, and 8.0% in their fifties.

I personally only trust Wikipedia to a small degree; to be honest, I can only fully trust articles I know myself to be correct, I trust items on non-controversial subjects to a lesser degree, so I suppose that makes me one of those who doesn’t really trust it. I edited the Takarazuka Theatre article, for instance, but I have seen some of my information removed, and now the article is descending into trivia, bad writing, and inconsistent information – I can see at least two mistakes in a quick scan. Controversial subjects are the least trustworthy, as the alleged “neutral point of view” ends up as being given to either the side who shouted first or loudest, or has the most friends in high places. As with a lot of Open Source, everyone wants to stamp their mark, but few want to just fix other’s stuff, and even if they do, they often unwittingly trample on the ego of those who want their information preserved.

A good example of the above is Japanese Name. This needs a complete rewrite, as the same information is repeated twice or even thrice, there is trivia galore, showing off (some valid, some invalid), falsehoods and slack wording.
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The Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan, or IPA for short, or even 情報処理推進機構, jouhoushorisuishinkikou in Japanese, just published their lists of the top ten threats to information security in Japan in 2005 (Japanese PDF).

Please follow the linked articles to find out more information about each vulnerability. Please also read my recently-translated survey on the use of Winny and other P2P software.
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japan.internet.com and JR Tokai Express Research recently conducted a survey to find out about 迷惑メール , meiwaku me-ru, nuisance mail literally, or unsolicited mail, or simply just spam. They interviewed 330 mobile phone owners, 60% male, from all around the country by means of an internet-based survey. The sample consisted of 25.2% in the their twenties, 43.0% in their thirties, 21.5% in their forties, 7.6% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

Initially, mobile phones’ email address defaulted to just the telephone number; in fact, when I first came to Japan my phone had no option for even changing the mail address. Now, with the increased awareness (and increased incidence too) of spam, DoCoMo at least (presumably the other carriers do similar things) give new customers a default email address that consists of their phone number plus a few extra random characters to defeat dictionary attacks.

I personally have got zero spam, mainly as I have a user name that is in no Japanese dictionary and I don’t sign up with dodgy sites that might leak mail addresses.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at the perception of online DVD rental. They interviewed 1,061 people from their monitor group at the start of March by means of an internet-based questionnaire. The sample was 43.3% male, with 25.0% in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 24.5% in their forties, and 9.0% in their fifties.

I haven’t rented a DVD since I got married, although perhaps before I did I might have investigated one of these companies, as I heard a bit about NetFlix from USA residents, and my local Tsutaya had a pretty thin collection of DVDs. Now, I don’t have enough time to even just catch up with what we record off cable! However, if I could find a cheap portable player – about Nintendo DS size with one face all screen, and an SD memory card slot – I’d snap one up in an instant for viewing on the train. The PSP and its UMD just look a bit too bulky and perhaps battery-hungry for my needs. I’d love to catch up on Monkey, both the original and the new versions, for instance.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, investigated how people use television stations’ web sites; both PC-centric and mobile phone-targetted sites were included. By means of an internet-based questionnaire, they obtained the opinions of 317 employed persons from all over the country; 71.3% were male, 22.1% in their twenties, 43.5% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, 7.6% in their fifties, and 1.6% sixty or over.

This survey, I feel, poses more questions than it answers. Which programs’ sub-sites within each channel’s offering are people choosing to view? Getting program details covers too broad a ground from just getting a synopsis for a movie to checking out some of the factual (or not quite so factual, as the case may be) information presented by a show after the broadcast. Why did Q1SQ2 not investigate if people gave feedback to shows or played web site games? What about different usage patterns for PC-based and mobile-based access? I suspect these answers may be obtained if one is willing to part with cash, though!
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japan.internet.com recently released an opinion poll, performed in conjuction with goo Research, to see what people thought about the novelisation (or novelization, if you prefer) of blogs and other web contents. 1,013 people completed their internet-based questionnaire, with 60.4% female. 27.0% of the respondents were in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, and 6.4% in their fifties.

When a similar survey was carried out a year ago, during the height of the “Densha Otoko” boom, 35.0% of the people surveyed then said they would want to buy a novelisation of a blog.

I can’t say I’ve come across any blogs I’d like to see as a book, although having said that I don’t follow any regular diary-like narrative-based blogs, which would seem to be the best material for making into a book.
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japan.internet.com released a short survey, carried out at the start of February in conjunction with goo Research to find out about how people use web mail services. This is the tenth time they have performed this survey, once every month since May 2005. 1,090 people, 46.8% male, from up and down the country completed the internet-based questionnaire. 2.1% were teenagers, 22.5% were in their twenties, 40.6% were in their thirties, 24.3% were in their forties, 7.4% in their fifties, and just 3.0% aged sixty or over.

Given that according to another survey, one in five Japanese has tried dating sites, I find that only 2% have used a web mail address for this purpose suprising. Perhaps the rest used their mobile phones or an alternative form of aliasing; my main provider, for instance, offers up to five aliases, selectable from not just standard @isp.ne.jp, but vanity ones like @teabreak.jp. Or perhaps people just lied more here!

Note that when the provider usage statistics below are compared to an earlier survey on brand image, goo performs better here than its brand image suggests, and Hotmail worse.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, carried out another of their short surveys, this time regarding what first sprung to mind when thinking about web services. They interviewed 1,036 people, 57.9% female, by means of an internet questionnaire. 2.7% of the respondents were teenagers, 23.0% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 2.0% in their sixties.

Whereas an earlier survey looked at primarily how brand image is conveyed via advertising, these web services are perhaps not sold as heavily through conventional advertising channels, but instead make their mark by some combination of word of mouth, familiarity and accessibility.

The mere one percent naming Gmail as the first mail provider to come to mind seems very surprising to me, although I wonder if Google has been targetting that service towards the English-speaking demographic at the expensive of foreign language speakers? How does the Gmail brand image rank in other countries, including at home in the USA? Does anyone know?

One nice thing, however, about Gmail being below the Japanese radar is that our office’s firewall does not block it (yet…), unlike Hotmail, Yahoo! web mail (Japan but not the UK) and the other big providers. Not that I check personal mail at work; no no no, not me at all.

In addition, Gmail is still invitation-only, but that hasn’t stopped SNS services spreading widely amongst the Japanese. By the way, if anyone out there would like a Gmail invitation, I have lots to give away!
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, conducted a survey to find out where businesspeople obtained their information from. 331 people from all over the country were questioned, with 73.4% of the sample male. 21.5% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 27.2% in their forties and 9.1% in their fifties. The survey was most likely conducted via a private internet poll, although this is not clearly mentioned.

I’m surprised that almost nine in ten regularly visit a portal, yet not even half visit a search engine, just scarcely beating the number who visit route-finding web sites, although I suppose it means that a good number of people do their searching directly from the portal.
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At the start of this month japan.internet.com in conjunction with goo Research got 1,089 replies to an internet-based questionnaire about the use of Question and Answer sites in particular, and looking up things in general. The user demographics were 23.0% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 7.2% in their fifties, and 2.8% in their sixties. 53.3% of the sample were female.

From the English language point of view, I’ve only ever questioned and answered on Experts Exchange in the dim and distant past, and glanced at Google Answers once or twice recently. I’m much more of a BBS and Usenet person myself.

One question not addressed by this survey (or perhaps only addressed if you pay money to get the full survey results) is how much people trust the answers they get. However, even a seemingly simple question like that may not have a simple answer. Thinking of Wikipedia, for instance (which isn’t a Q&A site, admittedly), depending on the information I am searching, my trust level varies. In fact, I have recently stopped linking to it as I feel that because the pointed-to page can change, I may no longer be referring to the same information that I was pointing to in the past; in addition for controversial subjects the page can get frozen, or at least adopted as a base line, at a non-neutral point of view, despite the protestations of neutrality from the ‘pedia-philes.
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